Mel’s role in Xero is to champion the profession of Bookkeepers while representing them back to Xero to develop the product to reflect their needs and requests.

She comes from a business background, having run a number of small businesses from technology to motorcycle sales.

She had a traditional accountancy practice with manual data entry, labour intensive site visits and billed time that was exhausting. She sold this in 2006 and it wasn’t till 2012 that, on the sale day of the motorcycle dealership, her accountant showed her Xero.

That night with a glass of wine she created a new bookkeeping business using Xero which she her business partner still operates while she is away with her Xero role.

Mel explains the importance of bookkeepers within the accountancy process, it is the foundation and provides the information that everything else is built on. Now, bookkeeping can be more efficient and with cloud, the whole process can be kept in house as the service has greater profitability.

Bookkeepers have the opportunity now to advise businesses on what is happening in real time with their businesses, rather than a historic perspective for the purposes of compliance.

The big change within the profession has been the way bookkeepers are perceived. Their station has been raised as people realise the value they can bring to businesses and the experience and knowledge they have. So much so that Mel wants to change the name of Bookkeeper to reflect the giant shift in activity, suggestions to [email protected]

In the future the role will become even more advisory. Rod’d keynote speech at XeroCon South highlighted the significance of AI and the advancement of data automation. This will impact on the whole profession and importantly on the previously labour intensive role of bookkeeping.

Find out more about partnering with Xero at: www.xero.com